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Tag Archives: Portugal

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Thursday, June 29, 2016:

The first successful pushback against the machinations of the New World Order elites last week was followed by much hand-wringing, second-guessing, and suggestions that the citizens of Great Britain didn’t know what they were doing and should take a mulligan (golf term: a do-over). The Wall Street Journal published a timeline of the exit process, which could take as long as two years.

Calling it a potential “multi-year tussle,” that process has the global elites in a pickle:

At least that’s the hope of Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, a quasi-liberal writing for a clearly liberal British newspaper, the Telegraph. He called the stunt that was tried and failed, at least for the time being, of robbing people point-blank in daylight, saying that

The official emblem of the European Parliament. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Anthony Wile is at it again. While most were caught up in the national election and the aftereffects of Hurricane Sandy and General Betrayus, Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, explained what the implosion in Europe is all about. In speaking to the European Parliament last Wednesday, she shed all cover and told all who would listen what’s really going on:

Of course the European Commission will one day become a government, the European Council a second chamber and the European Parliament will have more powers – but for now we have to focus on the euro and give people a little more time to come along.

Wile has been saying this for years. That’s part of why his blog has grown so rapidly: he sees with a view and an insight that truth seekers appreciate. Out of 644 million active websites Alexa ranks www.thedailybell.com at 16,991 in the United States. More than 6,700 people come to his Switzerland-based website every day. And his readership has grown 60% just in the last three months.

He’s like the 500-pound canary: when he speaks, people listen!

He notes that the European Union was always, from the very beginning, designed with

With economists predicting the start of an official recession in Europe, the latest numbers from the European Union’s statistics agency, Eurostat, show that the recession hasn’t been confirmed, at least not yet.

Without Germany’s slightly better economic performance in the first quarter, however, the recession would be official. Two quarters of “negative growth”—or rather shrinkage—is the usual definition of a recession, and it appears that the official declaration will have to wait until July. Germany was expected to grow at a paltry annualized rate of 0.1%—barely perceptible—but instead grew by a modest 0.5% in the first quarter, which followed a 0.3% contraction in the last quarter of last year. Some economists had the audacity to call this a “strong economic performance” by Europe’s powerhouse, but a closer look at the real numbers reveals how close a call it was and that it’s just a matter of time before the economists finally recognize the reality that

Following a 13-hour marathon session on Monday, eurozone ministers announced an agreement to loan Greece another $170 billion, which saves the banks while punishing private investors and damaging Greek national sovereignty.

The bailout brings the total spent or committed to save the eurozone countries of Greece, Ireland, and Portugal to $500 billion with little assurance that more won’t be needed very soon. Details of the agreement require that 90 percent of private bondholders agree to take a 53-percent haircut on their investments by exchanging old bonds for new. It requires acquiescence by Austria, Finland, Germany, the Netherlands, and Slovenia to allow the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund to part with the funds. And it forces Greece to accept permanent and rigid enforcement of debt service payments by outsiders monitoring government revenues and expenditures and forcing debt service payments to be made ahead of any other government commitments.

The parties who come out whole on the deal are, naturally, the European Central Bank and other banks that hold Greek debt. Their holdings will be paid off at par.

Observers with chips in the game were decidedly guarded in their enthusiasm. Joerg Kraemer, chief economist at Commerzbank AG in Frankfurt, said, “Greece will find it difficult to shoulder even the

Economists polled by Reuters predicted that the recession in Europe that began late last year would continue into the new year and they weren’t disappointed. Reuters announced that economic output in the 17-member eurozone declined by 0.3 percent in the last quarter of 2011, the sharpest since the second quarter of 2009 at the start of the recession. Those same economists are now predicting that European GDP growth will stay negative at least for the rest of the year with only modest chances of improvement in 2013.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has the same negative expectations, predicting at least a 0.5-percent contraction of the eurozone countries next year. Even Germany, long the anchor to windward and the engine of growth for the European community, went negative in the last quarter compared to its modest growth rate of 0.6 percent in the third quarter.

Investment banking firm ING admitted that the decline caught their forecasters by surprise. Carsten Brzeski said the economic contraction “turned out to be weaker than expected.”

The Netherlands declined into recession (defined as two quarters of declines in GDP, or “negative growth” in economic parlance) with its third quarter contraction of 0.4 percent followed by another 0.7 percent decline in the fourth. Italy’s economy dropped by 0.7 percent in the last quarter with little improvement expected for at least a year. This puts Italy into the same recessionary camp as Belgium, Portugal, and Greece.

Portugal may be looking for another bailout as its economy suffered at 1.3 percent decline in the fourth quarter, more than double the 0.6 percent decline from the third quarter.

But Greece is the basket-case poster child for economic performance, with a stunning

With Greece’s Prime Minister George Papandreou agreeing to step down in order to secure more bailout funds from the ECB, attention turned immediately to Italy’s financial problems that dwarf those of Greece’s. The Greek PM’s decision now clears the way for an interim government to agree formally to the new austerity measures demanded by the European Union as a condition of receiving additional financing by the end of the month. Those funds are needed to pay Greece’s bills through January 2012.

The bond market shifted its attention to Italy on Monday, driving interest rates on its 10-year bond to a record-high 6.66 percent, the highest since the country entered the union in 1999 and perilously close to

After spending the entire weekend trying to sell his company, MF Global, Chairman Jon Corzine finally capitulated, and his board declared bankruptcy on Monday morning, October 31. It was during negotiations with a potential suitor for the business, Interactive Brokers (IB), that word leaked out that customers’ monies were missing, and IB left Corzine to fend for himself. A board meeting was hastily called and ended Corzine’s dream of building another Goldman Sachs with other peoples’ money.

It isn’t as if the regulators were asleep. According to the New York Times, alarm bells went off last June when regulators from the Financial Industry Regulatory Agency (FINRA) first discovered that

If the decline in the Portuguese money supply for September is annualized, it will shrink by more than 20 percent, presaging more economic difficulties for a country already reeling from austerity measures imposed by the European Union. Measures of money supply are watched carefully by economists as a portent for economic behavior over the coming six to 12 months.

With an economy already suffering from 12-percent unemployment, a debt-to-GDP ratio approaching an astonishing 360 percent, and the yield on the country’s 10-year treasury debt exceeding 12 percent, it won’t take much to send the Prime Minister, Pedro Passos Coelho, scurrying to the European Central Bank (ECB), hat in hand, for more help.

In fact Portugal’s economy may already have gone over the edge. Simon Ward, economist with Henderson Global Investors, said that

Last week, the German parliamentvoted overwhelmingly, 523-85, to increase the size of the European Financial Stability Fund (EFSF) from $335 billion to $600 billion, and to allow it to purchase sovereign bonds, lend to profligate governments, and strengthen banks hurt by holding risky government debt.

Protests over the move came primarily from Wolfgang Bosbach, a member of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s own party and an initial supporter of the European Union. He pointed to the failure of the continuing Greek bailouts, observing, “The first medicine didn’t work, and now we are simply doubling the dose. My fear is that when the big bang happens, it won’t just be us who will have to pay for generations hereafter.” He still favors the union, however: “I don’t want to be co-opted into an anti-euro movement—the EU is an important political project. But what we promised the people was a union of stability, not a union of debt.”

Bosbach reflects increasing discontent of German citizens who find themselves forced to

In its efforts to avoid restructuring (i.e., defaulting on) its debt, Greeceannounced the sale of some of its assets to raise funds and to satisfy the austerity requirements imposed on the country last March. It is trying to raise $70 billion by 2015. Its efforts won’t be nearly enough.

For sale is the country’s 1/6th interest in OTE, Europe’s largest telecom company, its one-third interest in the Post Savings Bank, all of its interest in the country’s two largest port operators. It will also reduce its ownership shares significantly in

The McClatchy-Marist Poll, which was released last Monday, revealed that those calling themselves Tea Partiers have little interest in doing anything substantial about slashing government spending. This cuts the legs out from under any attempt by conservatives in Washington to rein in that spending and it also gives President Obama a huge edge going into the 2012 elections.

When the Portuguese Parliament failed to pass an austerity bill on March 23, the country’s Prime Minister, Jose Socrates, resigned. That move leaves Portugal leaderless for at least two months while facing a significant financial crisis: it must refinance nearly $13 billion of short-term debt by June. Investors have already pushed interest rates on Portugal’s sovereign 10-year debt to almost 8 percent, while credit-rating agencies Fitch and Standard & Poor’sboth downgraded that debt’s quality on March 24.

The European Union (EU) has already bailed out Greece and Ireland, and a top official announced that the EU has the resources to rescue Portugal, if necessary. The bailout would cost an estimated $60 billion to $80 billion.

Economist Niall Ferguson of Harvard wrote an article entitled “Complexity and Collapse” for the March/April issue of Foreign Affairs, a publication of the Council on Foreign Relations. Ferguson uses the visual image of a series of paintings by Thomas Cole, The Course of Empire, which currently hangs at the New York Historical Society, to illustrate his point that every society goes through five stages. He says that Cole “beautifully captured a theory of imperial rise and fall to which most people remain in thrall to this day.”

When former Comptroller General Bill Walker, who headed the U.S. Government Accountability Office, said two years ago that the “official” debt of the United States “is only around $10 trillion,” he wryly suggested that since this number was produced by “government accounting, which…allows one to ignore Social Security, Medicare and the new prescription drug benefit [it was like] ignoring rent, food and utilities in your household budget [and] it will lead to a few bounced checks.” However, he added, “Our real debt is about ten times higher,” or about $100 trillion.

At the time this was a breath-taking number, but Walker was just repeating what Richard Fisher, President of the Dallas Federal Reserve, had said just a couple of months earlier.